Hospital Injury Encounters of Children Identified by a Predictive Risk Model for Screening Child Maltreatment Referrals: Evidence from the Allegheny Family Screening Tool

This paper confirms that children identified as at risk by the Allegheny Family Screening Tool (AFST), a predictive risk modelling tool that supports child protection decisions in Allegheny County (PA, United States), are also at considerably heightened risk of hospitalisation injury.  The authors, including Rhema Vaithianathan and Diana Benavides Prado, used a one-off linkage between the child protection system and Pittsburgh Children’s Hospital data to show that children identified as at risk by the AFST are indeed at considerably heightened risk of injury, abuse, and self-harm hospitalisation.  The authors also identified a sharply heightened hospitalisation risk for children receiving the highest AFST scores and found that the AFST is particularly sensitive to the risk facing White children, which means the child protection system is potentially under protecting those children.

Citation:
Vaithianathan R, Putnam-Hornstein E, Chouldechova A, Benavides-Prado D, Berger R. Hospital Injury Encounters of Children Identified by a Predictive Risk Model for Screening Child Maltreatment Referrals: Evidence From the Allegheny Family Screening Tool. JAMA Pediatr. Published online August 03, 2020. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2020.2770

Related projects:
Allegheny Family Screening Tool